


Over, Under, Through

by gardnerhill



Series: Over, Under, Through [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angst, BAMF Watson, Community: watsons_woes, Disasters, Heroism, M/M, Trains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-16
Updated: 2013-07-16
Packaged: 2017-12-20 08:38:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/885237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Robert Frost wrote a disaster film.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Over, Under, Through

**Author's Note:**

> For JWP 2013 Prompt #  15: Almost halfway there! Miles to go before we sleep! - Use however this inspires you.

“Come this way, you’re doing splendidly. We’re nearly there.”

They had been “nearly there” for the last three miles, and Holmes knew how very far it was still to go – and that they dare not stop, not in this weather, not in these woods. Everything ached, the pain in his hastily-splinted arm screamed in his head, and he knew his ankle would need attention soon or gangrene and amputation was a very real danger. He tightened his good hand’s grip on the makeshift stretcher with its groaning occupant covered with his coat, and kept his mouth shut as he trudged through the snow and the utter blackness, following the man at the stretcher’s head. Others were worse off.

“Please, Mister. I’m so tired. My arm hurts. I just wanna rest.”

“Just a bit more, brave lad. Switch arms, so everyone can see the lantern and you can rest that arm. One foot in front of the other – yes, just like a soldier. Brilliant form, Sergeant! Did I ever tell you I was a soldier in India? They have elephants walking around the marketplace, the way we have cart-horses!”

“…Really?”

“Yes, and I’ll tell you all about them while we walk. Two, three, four, that’s got it – two, three, four, Sergeant! My regiment, the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, was sent to Bombay …”

Another story to keep the feet moving one after the other. One after the other, this bedraggled bleeding line of survivors from a derailed train-car heading for the nearest light and warmth and life.

_And a telegraph office to convey our regrets for the delay to Inspector Callender. We might make Brookstone Place on tomorrow night’s train from … from where we are heading. The station, I’m quite sure I knew the station’s name this afternoon. Another very good reason not to stop and rest, my head’s taken quite the jolt – and so has my arm and my ankle. And my eyes don’t want to focus; if I take off this blindfold everything will whirl around and make me vomit again. At least the blindfold helps the spinning._

“Holmes, the fireman.” Called out in Watson’s ‘doctor’ voice, carrying over the heads of the procession to the rear guard.

Holmes listened to the moaning charge he carried with the aid of the shuffling man ahead – judging from the jingle of his watch-chain and enunciated words, one of the conductors. Watson had bound the fireman’s stove-in ribs as securely as possible, but the rale was now a gurgling cough; Holmes did not need to see the pink foam forming around the man’s lips. “Worsening.”

“All right.” He’d heard that leaden tone in Watson’s voice before, during the middle of an influenza epidemic. “I’ll give him one more hour. If he gets no better, or starts screaming, I’ll tend to the matter.”

“Yes.” Holmes knew what “tend” would mean in this refugee march – enough morphine to let the man sleep (likely fatal, but a more merciful end in that case than his current agony).

Sobs. “Mama. I want Mama.”

“I know, lamb.” Very gently. “Your Mama wants me to take care of you. I’m sure she told me so, just before she went to Heaven.”

“She – she’s still back there. In that horrible car. With the others.”

“When we’re all safe, we’ll send the right people to get them all, so they can be buried at home in their own churchyards. She’s not afraid, and she doesn’t hurt any more. Mama wants you to live. Mama wants you to keep walking now. Can you do that, love?”

Sniff. “Yes.”

“Good girl.”

“This is no bloody good!” Not surprisingly, the banker from Dullwich who hadn’t taken a scratch in the derailment and had baulked at being pressed into aiding the injured. “We’ll never reach the blasted station, Watson! You’re leading us to our deaths!”

Father Bear vanished before the Fusilier. “You will walk until your goddamn feet fall off if you have to, Pennington. That is an order. We follow the tracks, and where there are tracks there are stations, and where there are stations there are telegraphs and towns.”

“A little rest isn’t going to hurt us!”

“It will kill you. We walk.” Colder than the bitter air that swirled around them.

Pennington responded with a foul oath. “I’m sitting down to rest! You’re not the bloody king of me!”

The loud metallic clicking sound of a Webley being cocked – louder than the crunch of their feet in the snow, louder than their groans and sobs.

Dead silence. One intake of terrified breath.

“A man can travel surprising distances with a bullet wound in his shoulder,” the Fusilier said calmly. “Am I understood?”

“Yes.” A frightened whisper.

“Then pick up that little girl and follow me, Pennington. And if it’s not too much trouble, try to comfort her.”

The banker’s steps changed, became more ponderous under a heavier load; he’d done as he was told.

The cold bit their faces and whipped at their bodies, seeping in through their clothes. Holmes shivered; his coat was on the dying fireman. But the bitter cold took much of the pain from his broken arm and wrenched ankle, even as it drove iron spikes into his head.

But they would not die out here, not with John Watson as their sheepdog.

Vivid as if it were still before him, Holmes saw the grim set to Watson’s eyes and the thin line of his mouth under the bloodied rag bound around his own head as he swathed Holmes in darkness.  He knew his friend’s mind as his own: _I have a duty to perform. Until that duty is discharged, this is my command. And I will march into Hell before I fail you, or anyone else under me, tonight._

“I’m so cold.”

“William, isn’t it?”

“Bill, sir. Me dad’s William.”

“William tonight, I think – your dad’s going to be very proud of you over this. I know what’ll make you feel warmer. Do you know the words? _I do like to be beside the sea-side! I do like to be beside the sea!_ ”

“Don’t much want to sing, sir.”

“But singing warms you and makes you breathe better, and rescue could hear us if we make a row. Come on, Master William! With me! _I do like to be_ – ”

“ _\- beside the seaside…I do like to be beside the sea_ …”

The words slipped in and out of his mind, but some came out, and Holmes made sure his voice rang out. Others picked it up, shouting out a ghastly music-hall ditty.

“It’sh a cliff!” the charwoman with the missing teeth cried out. “We’re losht!”

“We walk on the trestle. Follow me.”

If Watson said they would walk to the North Pole, Holmes would believe him.

“Oh…”

“Don’t look down, William. Just one beam to the next. Look at the beams, not the river.”

Wood under his unsteady feet, and his knowledge of tie spacing stretched his legs to land where they should, as if it were a boardwalk.

The trestle… that meant another mile or two only. They were halfway there. His feet and his heart took up the chant: _Halfway there. Halfway there. Halfway there._

 “Can’t hear you, Mrs. Hargrove! _Where the brass bands play: ‘Tiddely-om-pom-pom!’_ ”

Another sort of story to warm his blood and keep his feet moving and think of other things than the darkness and the pain: How to reward his lion of a friend for this act of conspicuous gallantry. The usual things, of course: champagne, oysters, a gold-headed walking stick. But it was the long list of illegal deeds behind locked doors that made his heart beat strong in his chest. Sherlock Holmes, like John Watson, was a man of his word; and he vowed that every one of these things would come to pass.

They would go over, under and through every obstacle between them and safety, fearing no evil. The fireman would die in a warm room, free of pain; the dead woman decently buried and her grave lovingly beflowered every Sunday for years by  her living, growing daughter; and all the others would live. His arm and head and ankle would mend; and Sherlock Holmes would teach John Watson all over again what he meant to him.

He straightened and followed his commander across the trestle he could not see.

_Halfway there. Halfway there. Halfway there._  


**Author's Note:**

> This story now has a coda: [Monarch](http://archiveofourown.org/works/907502).


End file.
